Four Centuries Contest Deadline Reminder

Reminder: the deadline for the “Four Centuries of Mormon Stories” contest is tonight at midnight. Email entries under 2,000 words (under 1,000 preferred) to everydaymormonwriter@gmail.com.

A final, brief Q&A on the contest:

Q: The deadline is at midnight tonight…but which midnight?

A: You can choose between midnight your time zone or ours (MT), whichever is more convenient. Since it’s a fiction contest, you can pretend you live in the South Pacific for deadline calculation purposes. We won’t be checking the inbox until the morning anyway…

Q: How many entries am I allowed to send?

A: Three per century. Meaning the you could submit a pioneer story, an alternative history, a historical fantasy telling of a well-known story, then follow it up with a lost WWI Dear John letter, an alternative history military thriller starring a Hugh B. Brown who was never discriminated against, and a story about a young Mormon boy named Eric and the awesome computer he had in 1984. After breaking for dinner, you could proceed to write a story about a woman writing a story for the Four Centuries of Mormon Stories contest, a story about anti-Mormon rioting in Indonesia during the tenure of the first Mormon president, and a story about Mormon teens in Kazakhstan discovering punk rock. Then, before the stroke of midnight, you could write a brief timeline of one ward’s response to the supervirus that kills the internet and our computerized refrigerators for good, a story about the ten tribes of Israel returning from their sojourn in deep space, and a story about young men and women on the new decade-long missions that spare them the long-established struggles of the wasted twenties.

Q: Let’s say I have a draft of my story, but don’t feel it’s ready for publication yet. What should I do?

A: Send it anyway. It will be fun for us to read the idea, even if the execution isn’t perfect yet. And finalists will have some time to revise before publication and voting.